ONSCREEN TEXT: Dr. Samuel Adams, a prominent scholar and expert on Wisdom literature, wealth and poverty in the biblical world, biblical theology, and many other related subjects, discusses the vitality of Atla’s databases to the study of theology and its many related disciplines.

ONSCREEN TEXT: Can you tell us about your work in general and some of the research and teaching you do?

DR. SAMUEL ADAMS: I've been teaching at Union Presbyterian Seminary for coming up on 20 years, now. I am a Biblical scholar, and would like to think that I work at the intersection, and in a number of different interesting aspects of the field of Biblical studies. As you mentioned, my writing tends to be in the area of wisdom literature. I'm writing a commentary that I've just finished. Volume one on for the Yale Anchor Yale Bible Series on Syriac, but I've also written on wealth and poverty. So I work on economics both in the ancient world and today. 

But I think that especially in this day and age, it's incredibly important that Biblical scholars and others in theological education be attentive to the intersection of what we do with what's happening in the public square, not just in the church but in areas of cultural importance, such as the Bible and film. And I had a brief career in politics prior to going to graduate school and continue to think about the intersection of the Bible and the public square, and also just religion and public discourse. So all of those things keep me super busy.

The other thing in terms of my teaching. We are a very vibrant seminary. We have an array of interesting students, both those who are recently out of college, a number of second career students, but also international students and teach a full array of courses there. The other thing I spend a lot of my time doing is, the seminary has a journal called Interpretation, which really has a global reach. And I'm the editor for that. So that's a really fulfilling aspect of my vocation also.

ONSCREEN TEXT: How do you utilize Atla’s databases in your research and teaching?

DR. SAMUEL ADAMS: It is the 1st place I go every single time I'm working on something, and as often as not it's the last place I need to go as well because of the comprehensive nature of the way in which the database interface works. It's rare that I don't find what I need, or I don't find a gateway to what I need almost never. And I work in some like. Sometimes I'm looking for essays that are 30, 40 plus years old. And I'm finding it increasingly the case that not only are those available, but those are now available electronically. So I can have immediate PDF access to what I need in and the time savings that that offers me just, differently from what it was 10 years ago, is absolutely phenomenal. I am finding that my writing and research is more focused. I can get to the writing a lot more quickly, and I have the resources I need, and I guess the other, the other thing that I find so useful is the ability to do complex searches, such that, you know, certainly the Scripture citation feature is excellent, but also, if I just if I know there's a source that involved an author or a term, and I can't really remember who wrote it. It's pretty much guaranteed that a few seconds on Atla is going to be able to jar my memory and allow me to find what I'm looking for.

ONSCREEN TEXT: How long have you been using Atla’s databases?

DR. SAMUEL ADAMS: Well in terms of in terms of research, I've been using Atla for, oh, my gosh! 25 plus years and using it in teaching since I was at Yale for my Phd. Which would have been in the early 2000s. But I think I would say I was beginning to notice it prior to Covid. But when we were in a situation during Covid, in which access to the library and to resources was limited, that didn't slow me down at all, ,I well, and then I could page it from the library based on what I found in Atla in the rare event that I couldn't find what I needed electronically.

ONSCREEN TEXT: Are there any specific features or aspects of Atla’s databases that you find particularly useful?

DR. SAMUEL ADAMS: I mean, just personally, a couple of things. One is that if I if I need something and I want to, you know, use it for a few weeks. One really neat feature is the capacity to just email it to myself. Like, I can send the file, and it will be immediately available, and I guess the other thing I would would add too is the abstract, and the indices are so full. For instance, one of the things that's sometimes hard to find is a particular edited volume or a festschrift that might have one essay I need, and perhaps those books are not fully, electronically available on Outlook. I wouldn't expect them to be. But I can immediately find the essay that I'm looking for and be able to locate that in our library instantaneously. I think the other thing that is helpful is the way in which, if you're pulling up a particular topic or autho, the way in which you can manipulate and arrange particular entries on something. Say, there's a articularly famous scholar, and you're trying to look and see what he or she wrote on a topic. You can narrow it down by date range by, you know, subtopic in a way that really, you know, sort of laser beam focus on what you need.

ONSCREEN TEXT:  Are there different components that make them useful to your students? 

DR. SAMUEL ADAMS: Our students have to do, we're a Presbyterian seminary, and so our students have to learn, or the Presbyterian ones, and most of the others end up learning Greek and Hebrew, and even for the ones who don't, in our Biblical studies classes they have to write exegesis papers, and they find that the Atla database is is really an indispensable tool in their work, because what they're able to do is to search for key Hebrew terms, key Greek terms. Certainly they can use the Scripture citation passage. But say they're doing something on a feminist interpretation of Genesis 3. When the woman has the encounter with the snake in the garden, they are able to very quickly determine what's been written in the last 50 years by Biblical scholars, theologians, ethicists, preachers on this topic, and they learn faculty with it, and they learn how to play around with the the database in a way that really allows them to pursue their particular interests.

ONSCREEN TEXT:  Can you share a specific example of when you or a student had a challenging project that Alta’s databases helped them or you complete?

DR. SAMUEL ADAMS: I'm thinking about times when… a good example would be this last semester, when I was teaching a course on the Bible and American politics, which is obviously a very timely topic right now. And we it was a historical. There's a historical aspect of the course. And then there was a more contemporary aspect, and I had students who were writing on really interesting, like, I had a student who wrote a really interesting topic on how did clergy respond to the Vietnam war in the sixties?  And you know, and how does that compare to the way clergy are responding in subsequent eras, and she was able to use Atla and find some of the most interesting, seemingly obscure sermons, journal articles, and and was able to put, you know, the sort of classical subtopics of theology Bible, but was able to use the Atla database to like search more contemporary sources in a way that that made one of the richest papers that I've ever seen from a student. I really want to encourage her to publish this paper, because it's that good, and she couldn't have done it without the Atla database. 

ONSCREEN TEXT: How has the interdisciplinary scholarship in Atlas databases contributed to your instruction during your courses?

DR. SAMUEL ADAMS: If we're not thinking along interdisciplinary lines, we're probably not doing our jobs right? So I think more and more professors in religious studies are thinking across disciplines, and I certainly do that with economics. When I wrote the book on Wealth and Poverty, I was able to utilize without leaving the Atla database. I was able to utilize the work of ethicists, economists, more contemporary data analysis of particular topics. One of the things I studied in the book is the, you know, inequalities in pay, and was looking at various, including the famous Harvard economist, Amartya Sin, and what they've written about inequality, say in Africa, and how that compares in India, and how that compares to the patriarchal context of ancient Israel, and you know I was able to do some interdisciplinary work through the database that really proved to be, I think, both interesting to myself and hopefully interesting to those who engaged it. I mean another area where I really like to work. Last year I taught a course on the Bible and film, and we were able to do a lot of really interesting interdisciplinary work. I had students writing papers on, as you know, we, as people, seem to be fascinated by various types of films, apocalyptic ideas, monster movies, miracle stories, just all kinds of different films. And they were able to find movie clips, access to film journals, and other certainly within the area of religious studies, but they were able to find interdisciplinary stuff that really helped them with their research. One of the things we talk about in Biblical studies is what we call reception history, and which means, how was the Bible received over the centuries? And that's something that we haven't necessarily given enough attention to always, but it's certainly getting a lot of attention now, a couple of examples where I think that's been helpful is the ways in which the Bible has been depicted in art. And so one of the things you can do, I think, in particularly of the Book of Job, when I've had students who've worked worked on job. In both basic and advanced classes job has been a fascination, particularly in art; paintings, sculptures, and whatnot, and the students have been able to find pictorial representations of Job in art to great effect by using the Atla database. And oftentimes again, they don't have to go to the library to to get the resources they need. They're able to do it, just, you know, from their computer.

ONSCREEN TEXT: How have your teaching and research become more multi and interdisciplinary over the course of your academic career?

DR. SAMUEL ADAMS: I think that has happened a couple of way.s One of the things that has that the world has changed over the last 10 to 20 years. I mean, there's just no question whatever your politics are. We live in a hyper-connected place where you know the intersection of work, home and wherever else you are is a bit more fluid than it was. So you know where we do research. How we do research is just has changed, I think, permanently. And so I find that some of the greatest insights I have, whether I'm grading a paper or writing a conference paper. They might happen in a coffee shop or in my car. Here's a good example. I think it's anecdotal. But I was working when I was getting promoted to full professor and gave my inaugural lecture my son was in his, I'd taken him to, for some tutoring for algebra ended up doing fine in algebra, but, as we all know, algebr 2 can be a little tricky. And so we had a couple of weeks, and so I'm sitting in the car, and I'm working on this, my inaugural address, that is, you know, was a really important part of my scholarly trajectory, and I hop on the Wi-fi for my Algebra 2 teachers, my son's Algebra 2 Tutor, and was able to access Atla in a cul-de-sac, find a resource that I thought of in the car, access it, look at it, incorporate it into my talk all while I was waiting for for my son to finish algebra, and so that's the world we live in now, that is. And so the opportunity, the ability to access this is so important in terms of you know what we're accessing just to repeat something that I said earlier. We just had an issue of the journal on Christian Nationalism of the Journal interpretation, and we had Biblical scholars writing for it. We had pastors writing for it. We had public figures writing for it, and all of them made use of the Atla database and all of their essays were richer because they were able to access a real, incredible cross-section of resources. And you know, materials.

ONSCREEN TEXT: Can you describe your relationship with the librarians at your institution and the role the library and its resources play in your work?

DR. SAMUEL ADAMS: Yeah, we have a phenomenal library. It's one of the, if I could brag on my institution, both aesthetically, in terms of its just physical space and beauty, but also in terms of the collection. It's one of the best of any seminary anywhere, and we have exceptional library staff. Both reference and our head librarians among the just those in charge of databases, all of them, and one of the things that we have done is we recognized, especially during the last strategic plan, or, I'm sorry, the last quality enhancement plan that the seminary did, which is something we have to do every 10 years for accreditation. We wanted to look at the issue that we felt was most pertinent to where we were as an institution, and we focused on information fluency, and we wanted to make sure that our students were able to access the resources that they should be able to, but also to know how to do it strategically and effectively in order to be critical thinkers, and in order to blossom into whatever vocational direction they seem to be taking. So we made information fluency, the sort of focal point of our last strategic plan. And a big part of that was harnessing the incredible resources that are in the available to them through the Atla database. So this is specifically, was specifically part of our last quality enhancement plan which I helped write. And one of the things that we have done that has just been incredible is, I now devote, I give in the intro class to the Hebrew Bible. We have breakout sections. But then we have a two-hour lecture each week. I now devote an entire 2 hr lecture to having our Chief Librarian come in and give the students a tutorial on how to use the research databases available to them, and she probably spends most of her time on the Atla database and works through. And because you have to remember, some of our students are second career and haven't been in graduate school or haven't been in college in decades, and some of them, you know. They're smart, they're eager to learn, but they don't necessarily have the technological faculty that maybe some of the other students do. So she comes in and does this session. And Todd, it's been incredible. I have seen and documented since we've been doing this, the exegetical depth of their papers, the clarity and amount of research they have done has gone up exponentially just by virtue of our focus on this and our decision to say we need to acknowledge information fluency as a real goal for our students. We need to give them the tools they need. We need to walk them through some of the more advanced features of the databases, especially Atla. And I've seen a direct result, a correlation between the quality of student papers and the clarity of their thought. As a result of doing this. So it's had a very concrete and measurable impact on student performance at the seminary.

ONSCREEN TEXT: As a faculty member of an institution that subscribes to multiple resources, what is it about Atla’s databases that are so valuable to your work?

DR. SAMUEL ADAMS: I think the speed with which the database works. As I mentioned earlier, the ability to cull resources and results in all kinds of different ways. The fact that Atla interfaces with so many well, every periodical in our field, whatever it is, but also outside of it, and and is only getting better and better in that regard. I would also be remiss if I didn't. We haven't touched on this totally, but just as a journal editor, the fact that our journal Interpretation. I get a printout every year of where our essays are accessed that that come. And we have a larger and broader and more diverse readership than we've ever had. And I attribute 95% of that to students and faculty and just interested readers accessing articles of interpretation around the world from places like Australia, Korea, you know, Kenya, Ghana just go down the list, and the fact that they are able to do that when they may not have the ability, or most cases don't have the ability to access physical copies of the journal. They can now do their research, access our journal, and it helps us, and it helps them, by virtue of their local library or institution subscribing to Atlas. So that’s also been, I think, a really gratifying thing for me as editor of the journal at my institution.